The Post-PUA Era of the Asian American Blogosphere

BKS Iyengar

(Image from Yoga Iyengar de Marseille)

But what has ego done to procreation, to the harmonious union of complementary opposites? It has twisted it into an act of egoic self-affirmation. Lust is self-validation through consumption. Control through the exercise of power.

–BKS Iyengar, Light on Life, p. 87 (ISBN-10 1-59486-524-8)

Here is what I intend to be my final piece on Asian PUA (Pick Up Artistry). I hope I can refer to it whenever anyone asks me a question about PUA and IR from now on. I want to put some measure of finality into this, and with that goal in mind, I wanted to create a milestone from which we can move on. The IR debate, of course, will most likely continue in some form or another, but after this piece and the ensuing conversation, I’m done with PUA.  In this piece, I make some statements about PUA, and I hope that no one takes any of the statements personally. I tried to make it as compassionate as I could, and I’m indebted to everyone who has pushed the conversation forward–we needed to have this talk, and I’m honored that you have all been supportive, even those whose actions have surprised me.  I mean this in a genuine way.  Even though I witnessed some bizarre behavior while on my quest for answers, we would have not come to this point of our understanding without the participation of all of you.  I honestly thank you.

IR, interracial relationships between Asian women and white men, has always been a major part of the Asian American socio-political dialogue. It’s been such a contentious issue that the major Asian American site ModelMinority.com only allows people to discuss the issue within one specific virtual room. The Fighting 44s drew much of its initial popularity from discussions on IR, and columnist Jeff Yang, according to Thymos member Larry, calls IR the “third rail” of Asian American politics. As early as the 1970’s, Frank Chin, one of the early pioneers of Asian American activism, focused hard on the absence of Asian male/Asian female pairings in literature (Mr. Chin’s work is probably the best I’ve seen on the issue). So when William Lee, an activist from the former Fallout Central, took a bootcamp from the ABCs of Attraction where he learned to pick up women, he began thinking of turning it into a form of activism. After all, he said, if Asian American men complained about IR and had trouble attracting women because of their race, why not address the issue directly by making it a cornerstone of activism? JT, the leader of the ABCs, had so far missed the mainstream with the idea, so by taking the PUA concept and merging it with William’s talents in activism, they rationalized that they could make big strides in activism by teaching men to be “better with women.” William closed down Fallout Central, started Better Asian Man, and focused his podcasting and workshop talents into promoting Asian Pick Up Artistry through the ABCs of Attraction.

It’s taken me a while to get to the bottom of the topic of PUA–there were so many layers to uncover. You can see my earlier views here and here.  After getting to know the community, the method, and seeing and hearing about some of these guys in action, my views have since changed. There are two problems with Asian PUA, practice and theory, and these two problems essentially guarantee failure on a moral level for both the organization and general empowerment. I’ll first talk about practice and theory and why Asian PUA is not a good thing. Afterwards, I will discuss what we can do to help Asian men who have problems communicating with women, as well as the next step in fixing a broken social atmosphere.

Practice

In order to have a useful dialogue, it’s helpful to acknowledge that the stated intentions of Asian PUA and the actual practice are two entirely different entities. One of the reasons it took me so long to find out the real story behind PUA is that although the adherents constantly mention honesty, they bob and weave and misrepresent the truth whenever people ask direct questions–some of them do this intentionally, while others simply don’t know how to answer.  When you get to the bottom of the story, it’s apparent that PUAs hide the actual practice because they are embarrassed by it. If you look at this thread here for example, honest questions by female posters are greeted with an answer that says, in effect, “Well, you need to fly out to New York in order for to see for yourself.” It’s a needlessly complicated answer to the easy question of what PUA really is.

So here it is in a nutshell:

1. Respect for women: There’s no respect for women within the Asian PUA world. Zero.  Sometimes this disrespect is unintentional, but sometimes it’s absolutely intentional.  PUAs objectify women, giving them labels such as HB10 (”Hot Babe 10.”) They encourage men to post “lay reports” about women with whom they sleep. Some of the instructors even post pictures of women on their site, some of whom explicitly ask not to be included.  Both students and instructors all do this. Read this post where someone who knows the community and has dated a pickup artist talks about how they encourage men to get around women who say no to sex.

What’s worse is that the PUAs in charge make no effort to fix this, nor have they denied the accusation. I’ve learned from someone that took the course that the culture behind the ABCs is one which denigrates men who don’t sleep with (or claim to sleep with) lots of women. They keep tallies of who sleeps with whom, and they constantly promote bad behavior with their lay reports and field reports. It’s all about who gets the most sex. Getting sex, of course, is not bad, but when it’s a person’s only measure of self-worth, it doesn’t amount to much.

On an activist level, this is troubling. How can you stand for something good when your teachings aim to further disempower women who have historically faced problems with objectification and sexism? How can you claim to help men when you are realigning their value system with nothing but sex? It’s a strange contradiction. The Asian Playboy says, “If you want the woman of your dreams, you need to be the man of her dreams too.” Unless the man of her dreams is a leech who tries to circumvent the legal definition of rape through brute force perseverance, I fail to see how the ABCs curriculum encourages being the man of any woman’s dreams.

2. Honesty and character: To answer this question, look here. There really isn’t much to say beyond this–one of their lead instructors plagiarized in order to attack a woman that he used to know, and this instructor happens to teach the ABCs ethics class. In the end, this instructor did the right thing by removing his theft and correcting himself, but he failed to do the honorable thing, which would be to apologize for his actions. He could have apologized to the woman whose writing he plagiarized. He could have apologized to the members of the 44s who put time and effort into understanding him. He could have apologized to the people who have supported him. He could’ve apologized to people like me and King4aDay, who put our trust in him and whom he betrayed and threw under the bus.  But he didn’t apologize, nor did any of the ABCs instructors, all of whom were aware of the incident.

The lead instructor shouldn’t have plagiarized in the first place, but perhaps even more disturbing is the behavior exhibited by his students right after his plagiarism. The post has since been removed from the ABCs of Attraction community forum, but if you had looked right after the plagiarism, you would see that this breach of ethics was accompanied by the most despicable, vile sexism and misogyny directed at the woman from both instructors and students of the ABCs.  These people kept saying stuff along the lines of “Who cares what he did?  He’s helping us get some, so we support him!”  I can maybe understand if William has an ethical lapse, but a whole organization? That would be like the entire Christian church rallying behind Ted Haggard and saying, “He has a right to sleep with gay prostitutes! Who cares, as long as he’s getting us into Heaven!” How hard is it to ask your leader not to plagiarize?  Any organization in which ethics takes a back seat to self-interest is problematic.

3. Relationships: Make no mistake, PUA is about sex, not about creating relationships. If you look at the ABCs message boards, PUA’s brag about sex. They write about the women they sleep with, creating what they call “lay reports.” The modus operandi is to sleep with as many women as possible. This is encouraged, by the admission of people in the community.

It’s amazing because to the outside world, the PUA instructors are constantly telling people how long term relationships are best. Read the Asian Playboy’s AsianWeek report, or read BetterAsianMan’s blog, and that’s what they love to tell the outside world. Yet none of the instructors are in long term relationships, and when they date women, they treat them with a flagrant disregard for respect, honesty, and equality. As King4aDay from the Fighting 44s points out, you would think that people who teach men to be good with women would try harder to understand women. But the PUA approach isn’t one that encourages listening. It encourages the “brute force” approach, even going as far as to circumvent the objections of women who say no to sex (and again, I didn’t see this, but when it was brought up, NO ONE contradicted it, and some even tried to defend the approach.).

Most people who look at the curriculum of the ABCs would see lots of beautiful words about trust, honesty, and openness, while the public information on APB’s site about the practice itself is blatantly sexist. The typical PUA excuse is that it’s just marketing, and that the practice is actually quite respectful. But if you look at the practice, it’s clear that the practice is also sexist, despite whatever claims they make to the contrary. Like peacocking PUA’s, they become adept at hiding the truth.

As activists, we value practice above any kind of theory, and in order to see something for what it really is, we judge actions. Clearly, the actions of the ABCs of Attraction, both those of its clients and instructors, are reprehensible. They perpetuate the worst stereotypes and behavior, and they create a mindset that only further disempowers women and damages men by doing exactly the opposite of what they tell the world they’re trying to accomplish.  Some of these instructors/PUAs know better, but they do it anyway.  It’s vile, and both PUA and the ABCs of Attraction ought to be condemned by anyone with a moral conscience.

Theory

This is the question that comes up more often than any other, and it was actually this question which first stoked my interest in PUA. The question is as follows: Even if the practice is bad, can’t we learn something from what they do?

The answer is that you can always learn something from anyone, but in this case, you can’t learn by example.

There are a number of good things PUAs do. If you look at their curriculum, they supposedly ask people to be honest, direct, and to have open communication. They ask men to get to know themselves and what they have to offer. These aren’t bad actions, and they could be good habits if the practice adjusted to the theory–as I mentioned above, the words usually don’t match the actions. However, these prescriptions for good living aren’t original. If you look at Tony Robbins or any of these other relationship/success teachers, they all say the exact same thing (and in fact, this is where PUAs originally found their inspiration, and therefore it’s also a part of APB’s “lineage“), and more often than not, they teach it in a way that more accurately reflects what they’re teaching. The PUAs also have an extensive support network that teaches men to help one another. This is very good.  If Asian American activists had that kind of network, we’d be unstoppable.  But of course, the activist effort is harder since a good activist doesn’t dwell on ego.

Now the problem that PUA faces–and this is all PUA, not just the ABCs–is that they are driven by sex and therefore ego. Men join to boost their own confidence, and they define their self-worth by how many women they sleep with. As the wise Mr. Iyengar noted in the quote above, “It has twisted it into an act of egoic self-affirmation.”

I’m not saying that men should go off to an ashram and be celibate for the rest of their lives. It’s clear to me that men will always need women and will always judge themselves by the women they attract, more so than women will judge themselves by men. That was the point behind my second piece on Asian American Maleism–the genders tend to behave differently. There’s a definite asymmetry that exists when comparing the two genders. At the same time, if your entire cause is focused on ego, your entire cause is doomed to failure. It becomes one giant ego fest, a movement which is unable to get out beyond one’s immediate sexual needs.

This was the problem with the Better Asian Man’s ethical breach. He was unable to see past his own ego, and his followers were also unable to see past their own selfish needs. No one pushed for higher principles because principles took a back seat to ego.  When the going got tough, it was either every man for himself, or every man for the cult leaders.

Indeed, that’s the problem with men. If you create a culture where men think with their penises before anything else, you can be sure that anything that has to do with principles, cultural advancement, love, real emotions, intelligence, or progress will be doomed to failure. BKS Iyengar realized this, as does anyone else who deals with lots of people. People wind up cheating one another and doing everything for the purpose of affirming their own fragile egos.

This is why PUA as an activist movement fails.

Post-PUA Empowerment for Asian Men

Almost all intelligent Asian Americans see that Asian American men face an upward battle in the American social scene, and this includes people like Tan and Hong Kingston whose actions and words have been mostly, in my opinion, anti-Asian male. There is no question that the American social scene has wreaked havoc on Asian American lives. It’s even become a standing joke among non-Asian people. I agree that we need to do something about it, and I would agree with the PUAs that any action needs to take place on the ground level through some form of actual mentoring, rather than just a website, book, or other form of mass media.

There is no one right way to fix the gender divide. What would work for a Goth male meeting a Goth female would probably not work with a Senior VP executive meeting another Senior VP executive or a Goth meeting a Senior VP, for that matter. Human beings are diverse, and people have different tastes and lifestyles.

This is an institutional problem, and we need institutions to fix it. The ABCs is an institution, of course, but we need honest institutions guided by strong ethical principles and strong people who are willing to enforce these principles. The IR disparity is a serious problem that requires serious effort with people who have the discipline to become better people. On a theoretical level, the goals of these institutions need to go beyond sex for the reasons presented above. They need to go beyond just selfish ego, and they need to focus their energies on the improvement of society rather than just “getting some.”

People have presented a number of very good solutions to this problem, and I’ll list them here.

1. Xian’s solution

2. Kimtae’s solution
post #19

3. The Dale Carnegie Method

I recommend all of these solutions–or combination of these solutions. All emphasize honesty, and all emphasize self-mastery. These solutions will most likely be most powerful, however, as part of an institutionalized effort, and for the institution, I would emphasize something that Xian wrote (and that the Carnegie Method emphasizes as well):

Sincerely care about others and portray that unconditionally. If you are merely selfishly pursuing folks, anyone with a decent head on their shoulders will figure that out, so you will attract idiots or people who have security issues. If you like that, and you can do it without being abusive, more power to you, but that’s not where happiness is for most people. Do good things for others, but don’t see it as some type of pussy flea-market. Expecting intimate attention and sexual possibilities for niceness is creepy!

The point is that it can’t be a selfish endeavor. Picking up women is not nearly as hard as these PUAs make it out to be, and turning it into a science is counterproductive. It’s like Tom Cruise says in The Game: if you spent as much time on trying to improve other aspects in your life, think of how much you could accomplish.

William points out that he was an activist long before becoming a PUA, and he tells us how it didn’t help him with women. While I believe his account, I’d also posit that he failed because he was doing activism with the wrong mindset–he was thinking only of his own ego and wasn’t trying to help others. Activism and community engagement is hard when you don’t have the right intentions.

If the intentions are right, however, community engagement is the best thing. You can contribute to an Asian American activist group, and it will help the IR disparity because it will empower the men and women around you. You can contribute to a motorcycle club, and it will help the IR disparity because it will empower the men and women around you. You can run a book club, and it will help the IR disparity because it will empower the men and women around you. Anything you do will help the IR disparity, as long as:

1. You are creating community
2. You’re working as part of an institution
3. You’re coming into it with the right mindset
4. You learn to express yourself
5. You’re concentrating on improving the lives of the people around you
6. You provide room where Asian men AND women can speak honestly about what they feel and have experienced

This is the answer. It’s simple because it’s straightforward. No negging, AMOG-ing, or any of the other games that PUAs play. It’s complex because it’s institutional, and it takes skills and dedications to build or recreate institutions.

In any case, I’m not content just to provide the theoretical solutions. I’d like to help create the solution. So we will have a podcast coming up very soon, and I hope to provide dialogue that will jumpstart community projects that can help us with this IR problem. The IR problem comes in large part from colonized thinking.  I don’t know if institutions are strong enough to totally destroy that colonized mindset, but I’m positive that we can improve the situation together, and I hope that you will all join me in putting our efforts into doing the right thing.  Thanks for reading.  Feel free to throw ideas out on this blog post, or e-mail me to let me know if you’re interested in participating in the podcast.

Acknowledgements: I need to thank the Fighting 44s, who first introduced me to the concept of PUA and gave us a place to discuss it. Thanks especially to Dialectic, Lopan, Ellen, Box, Xian, Kwak, Kimtae, THX, minbo, King4aDay, and urB4N, who helped pushed the dialogue in a constructive manner. Thanks to the Asian Playboy, who took the “Mystery Method” and marketed it as an Asian movement. I still respect you for pushing the dialogue, even though I don’t approve of what you do. Thanks again to John Kwak, who showed me that there are always people in need and that there are always good people in every organization. Thanks, Jin, for revealing the truth about PUA. We all would never have learned the truth without you, and though you yourself endured tough attacks from both pro- and anti-PUA proponents, you exhibited bravery and perseverance. Thank you.  Thanks to the BetterAsianMan William Lee, who has pushed the dialogue on this issue, and who has taught me, both directly and indirectly, intentionally and unintentionally, what PUA is all about. You’ve got lots of talent. Lastly, thanks again to kimtae and xian, who provided alternatives early in the conversation and who were unfairly ignored by people who were pushing an agenda. Your contributions were never forgotten.  Now we can finally move forward.